BeyondCorp Weekly 51
Ivan Dwyer - February 13, 2018
This week’s newsletter will be brief, as I’m on the road hosting our Boston and New York Meetups. If you’re local and haven’t RSVP’d yet, be sure to do so!
As you may know, we held a special event in SF last week, bringing together a panel of experts in the space to discuss their experiences with BeyondCorp in their roles as infrastructure and security leaders. Joining me on stage was Marc Rogers from CloudFlare, Patrick Albert from AppDynamics, and Ryan Seekely from Quid. We packed the house at Heavybit, and had a rather lively discussion. The video recording should be available in time for next week’s newsletter, but I did want to highlight a few key takeaways in the meantime.
The key outcome is speed. Traditionally, we’ve incorporated defense-in-depth through more security layers. A byproduct of this, however, can be a poor user experience. A key benefit of BeyondCorp is that it enables defense-in-depth through the architecture itself, not more layers. Where security once was a blocker, it can now be an enabler. The trick is finding the right balance between security and speed, where one isn’t sacrificed for another.
It starts and ends with visibility. The panelists all agreed that BeyondCorp provides better visibility into user activity. When thinking about where to start, it’s often a good exercise to run through a discovery phase; taking inventory of all devices, monitoring and logging all traffic, etc. It then stands to reason that a BeyondCorp migration begins by seeking visibility, and ends with gaining visibility, coming full circle.
Get to base camp first. Another important area of agreement across all the panelists is that you don’t have to treat BeyondCorp as a mega transformative shift the same way Google did. There are easy wins along the way that are aligned with cloud best practices. Try incorporating new access controls with some of your cloud native apps. For a quick, out-of-the-box solution, that’s what we provide at ScaleFT with our Web Access product.
All-in-all, the panel was a success, encouraging the audience to be proactive with their security posture, and to look to BeyondCorp as a guide, not as the end-all be-all security silver bullet. I hope to host of these discussions to hear from practitioners in the field as they are incredibly valuable. Stay tuned!
Upcoming Events
BeyondCorpBOSTON
Feb 13th
Oficio (map)
5:30-7:30 PM
BeyondCorpNYC
Feb 15th
38 Parlor (map)
5:30-8 PM
BeyondCorpATX
Feb 28th
Uncle Julio’s (map)
5-8 PM
That does it for this week. Check back this time next week for another set of relevant news, articles, and events. Cheers,
Ivan at ScaleFT
Ivan Dwyer
Ivan Dwyer is the VP of Product Marketing at ScaleFT, working with the community to raise awareness around BeyondCorp and Zero Trust for organizations of all kinds looking to modernize their security architecture.
